In November 2022 Leeds City Council's Employment and Skills Leeds and Leeds Culture Programmes hosted the first Leeds Creative Skills Festival. We welcomed over 2000 visitors to the Leeds first direct arena who spoke to over 60 exhibitors and attended a series of workshops and we are back for 2023.

We are currently accepting exhibitor bookings for the second festival which will be taking place on Monday 20th November 2023.

The festival is a unique opportunity to showcase everything Leeds has to offer in this sector.

One of our exhibitors last year told us:

Amy Letman, Creative Director Transform writes...

Over the last few years at Transform we have been thinking about the future of international festivals, who creates them, participates, and leads them. Festivals are by their nature transitory and temporary. Transform festival is known as a flurry of international performance and events that explodes into the cultural scene and then fleetingly passes. However, many of our projects leave lasting impressions long after the festival has culminated.

Immerse yourself in the atmosphere of one of Yorkshire’s historic worsted mills.

The mill’s archive contains over sixty thousand lengths of cloth, eight thousand fabric designs, five thousand dye cards, guard books and artefacts associated with nearly 200 years of cloth production. A source of inspiration for anyone fascinated by heritage and textiles.

Sunny Bank Mills is launching ‘Threads’ – a weekend festival celebrating textiles through a series of talks, workshops and more, part of our celebration of 10 years of arts and culture at the mills.

Leeds 2023 and the WOW Festival have brought together 300 women and non-binary people for a giant construction project to build a barn on Cinder Moor and I’ve volunteered to be one of the Barn Builders.

Full disclosure, this isn’t the first time I’ve built a traditional timber frame building. Seven years ago, armed with two books bought from the internet and some basic woodwork skills, I set about designing and building a workshop in my back garden. It took me a year and I learnt a lot along the way, but that’s a story for another day.

The participants on our epic citizen films The Good Book and the Magician told us they wanted more specialist skills in backstage areas and we were so excited to oblige for those more interested in learning from the professionals in production areas.